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imperative

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Also known as imperative verb, imper, imper., hortatory, immediate imperative mood, imperative sentence, imperative mood, Imp

grammatical mood that expresses a command or request

AI overview

An imperative is a grammatical form used to give commands or make requests, like when you say "Close the door" or "Please pass the salt." It matters because it's one of the main ways people communicate what they want others to do in everyday conversation.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

~26 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request.

The imperative mood is used to demand or require that an action be performed. It is usually found only in the present tense, second person. They are sometimes called directives, as they include a feature that encodes directive force, and another feature that encodes modality of unrealized interpretation.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “imperative” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.